Those of you who have N900’s may have seen the ColecoVision emulator, the Sega GameGear emulator, and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum emulator in the Maemo App repository; but have been wondering where are the Nintendo emulators?
A few weeks ago the Maemo Community Council quietly removed Nintendo Emulators from the Maemo App repository (kind of Apple like behavior in my opinion).
It turns out the reason for the disappearance was Nintendo took legal action against Nokia in order to stop the distribution of the emulators. Why does Nintendo still care about these old games? Well Nintendo still makes some money on the remakes and the sale of old school games running on the Wii Virtual Console.
After the Maemo Council re-evaluated and discussed the options, they have apologized to N900 owners and the Maemo community and have added the Nintendo emulators back on Maemo.org.
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The emulator’s code does not infringe on copyrights, and emulators are not illegal. It is the game roms that are under copyright and thus are not distributed by Maemo, and never have been. Note: I am not a lawyer =)
The emulators in question were iNES, VGB, and VGBA.
Source: Missing emulators will be back
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